[EP 17] Building Your Dreams with Mary Morrisey & Jack Canfield

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Welcome to the Jack Canfield Podcast. And today I am thrilled to be sitting down with a very dear friend and an extraordinary visionary in the field of personal development, Mary Morrissey. Now, Mary and I have known each other for years, and every time we talk, I'm struck by the depth and the breadth of her wisdom and the authenticity of her message. She's not just a speaker and best selling author, she's a beacon of hope and transformation for thousands of people around the world. Now, she's spoken on stages from the United nations to meetings with the holiness of the Dalai Lama and even Nelson Mandela in South Africa about crucial global issues with grace and insight. She has a master's degree in counseling psychology and an honorary doctorate in Humane letters. And her books, no less than Greatness and Building your field of Dreams and which was transformed into a PBS special, have been sources of inspiration for many. And now Mary's written a new book, Brave the Art and Science of creating a life you Love, in which she provides a blueprint, a bridge and a building process turning dreams into reality. Now, before we start this conversation, I want to read just a little description of her book because we're going to be talking about that quite a bit and then we'll jump into it. I mean, I'm quoting, it says, deep inside you is a dream, an extraordinary life. To create a life you love, however, you can't just dream it, you must also build it. And Mary Morrissey has helped millions of people break through the barriers of fear, doubt and past failure with proven, repeatable system of transformation. The system is what we're all looking for, called brave thinking. And by using Morrissey's brave thinking tools, you will enter a realm where the impossible becomes possible in the four quadrants of your life, which are health and well being, love and relationships, vocation and time and money, freedom. Dream building doesn't require a fancy degree. All you need is a clear vision, a shift in belief and a set of practices you can repeat every day. And by following the steps in this book, you will learn to think bravely, act boldly, and ultimately live a life you would truly love. Mary, I'm so glad to have you here today to explore these ideas and practices with you. Welcome.

Thank you, Jack. I'm thrilled to be here.

I am more than thrilled, quite frankly. One of the people I really love and admire very, very much. So you have. This new book came out this year, Brave Thinking. And it starts with a powerful statement. It says, everyone dreams, but few people understand how to dream, build. And I Totally agree with that. It's not something we teach in our schools, so most of us have never learned it. You have to find a teacher or mentor. You have. Yours was Jack Bullen, mine was W. Clement Stone, who was a close friend of Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Go Rich, where you have to take workshops, you know, watch YouTube videos or read books like the one you have written in Brave Thinking, which is a powerful, practical how to guide for creating the love you love. It's also a powerful, raw revelation of your own life. Learning and applying the principles you were learning to overcome your own obstacles and creating your dream life. What I'm going to call your origin story, which took place in Beaverton, Oregon when you were in high school, is such a powerful story. Can you start by sharing that with us?

Yeah. Okay. That was actually, I think unbeknownst to me at the time, but the beginning of my lifelong calling to study transformation and how it actually occurs. I had a high school experience like most young girls dream about. I was class vice president. I was on my junior year in high school, class vice president, leading the junior play, vice president of my class and homecoming princess. My high school boyfriend, who I'd been dating for four years, had gone off to college, came home on spring break, May 1st. I find out I'm pregnant. I tell my mom and dad. My mother wept for me as if I had died, thinking that all her dreams for me were dying. We had a very hasty 10 person wedding. Two weeks later, the principal calls me to his office and says, are these rumors I'm hearing about you true? I said, this is 1966. I said, well, if the rumors are that I'm pregnant and married in that order, then yes, they're true. He just put his head in his hands and he said, mary, you have great grades, terrific honors. You will not be allowed to return here for your senior year in high school. It would be totally inappropriate for a pregnant girl to get mixed in with the normal girls. But if you want a high school diploma, which I did because I wanted someday to become a teacher and I saw getting pregnant as a detour, but not a dead end. He said, so if you want to get a diploma, there's a place for people like you. It's across the river. It's held after dark. It's where the pregnant girls and the delinquent boys go to high school. So. So you could go there and get a diploma. So I went across the river part of Portland. I hadn't been allowed to drive in up until then. And I remember walking up the steps. So, you know, I'm saying to the listener now or the viewer, I'm thinking, wherever you were when you started your senior year or the equivalent in high school, that's where I was. And I'm thinking, every girl here is pregnant. Every guy is some kind of delinquent. My son was born in December. I graduated in May from Washington, not regular high school, but Washington Evening High School. Then in July, I found myself in an intensive care ward in a Portland hospital, having been diagnosed with fatal kidney disease. Now, this is 1967. I have nephritis that has destroyed one kidney. Active nephritis in the other, 50% destruction. They're telling me without transplants or dialysis at this point available, that's a death sentence. They're telling me if we can get the blood toxin level in my body reduced enough to sustain a surgery to remove the right kidney, then maybe I would have six months. And I'm wondering if I'm even going to see that little boy ever walk. I'm terrified about not getting to ever become a teacher, raise him. All the things that any one of us would dream. You're 18 years old and your life is told. You could have six months. Finally, the night before the surgery was scheduled, a woman walked in my room that night and identified herself as a visiting chaplain, saying she came several times a week and she would get the list of the people having surgeries the next day in the order of most serious. My name was at the top of the list, and I want someone to pray with me. I was scared. The God of my upbringing, though, Jack, at that point was I actually my. My perception was that I was just being punished, that this was an angry God of my upbringing. And punishing, not forgiving, really was the. The experience I'd had of getting to know this version of the infinite. And I just, you know, clearly I'm a bad person. I could go to high school with my friends, my girlfriends, mothers told. Told them they could no longer see me, as if what I. And I've just, you know, I'm going to school with delinquents. I mean, this is a pretty defining of me. So when she walked in and said, do you want someone to pray with you? I was scared. So I said, okay. She didn't do anything that looked at anything like what I'd learned as prayer. She just pulled her chair next to my bed and she said, would you be willing to tell me what's been going on in your life the last Year or two. And I told her my story, at the end of which she looked at me compassionately and she said, mary, everything's created twice. I'm just like, what are you talking about? And then she said, you know this. In fact, everybody knows this. Almost nobody knows the power of knowing this. The bed you're laying on, the nightgown you're wearing, the sheets, the ceiling, the floors, the machinery, all the machinery you're hooked up to. First it had to be a thought before it could be a thing. Then she said, I hear how much you love your little boy, but I can also hear how much you've been hating yourself. And she said, so you know that if you think scary enough thoughts, your heart's going to beat faster. And if you think embarrassing thoughts, your cheeks are going to get red. Could it be possible that by thinking all this self loathing, that that toxicity and those thoughts could actually generate a toxicity that's rampaging your body and threatening your very life? Now, this is 1967, the summer of 67. There's not a mind body clinic at Harvard or UCLA or Stanford, any of these places teaching hospitals yet. So the idea that what I'm thinking could have something to do with my health was completely foreign to me at that time. But when she said, if I think scary thoughts, my heart will beat faster, I did know that if I think embarrassing thoughts, my cheeks are going to get red. I did know that. But the idea that I could think toxic thoughts in my body might be toxic was completely foreign. Then she said, so in a universe where there are infinite possibilities, could you believe that there's a possibility we could say a prayer tonight? And in the morning the doctors come to get you and they say, you look much, much better. We better test you. And they test you, they say, you can go home, you're actually fine. Could you believe that? And I told her the truth. No, there wasn't one part of you that believed that was going to happen for me, she said, all right, then, could you believe there's a possibility? Remember, infinite possibilities. There has to be one where we could imagine. And she said, we're going to do a. I don't even know if she called it a visualization or an imagination, but it was not something I was familiar with. And she. We could imagine that all the toxicity, we're going to scoop it up through your body, put it in that one kidney that's going to be removed. And when it gets removed, instead of getting worse, you could actually get better. Could you believe that? And in that moment I didn't believe it, but I could tell she did. And that was my first moment really, I think, to decide to lean into or borrow someone's belief who was operating at a higher domain than mine. And I said, well, I don't know if it's probable, but maybe it's possible. And she just latched onto that. Now this is before Sheldrake and David Bohm. And I mean all of this coming out, us understanding more of the science side of how things occur. And she said that's all we need, one corner of your mind open to the possibility, let's work with that. And then she gave me really a mindset and a prescription for how to use my mind, but she didn't tell me that. She said, here's what's going to happen in the morning. In a moment we'll do this visualization and then they're going to take you to surgery. After surgery your mind is going to be busy with the pain and the after effect of this surgery. It's a major surgery. And she said, but as that ebbs, your mind is going to want to go down the well worn paths of thinking that you've been thinking and it's going to want to pick up self loathing again. So here's what I want you to do. Because she had said, if you could live, what would you do with your life? I said I would raise my little boy and I'd be a teacher. Now at that point I thought classroom teaching was my vision from that point of view. And so she said, okay, so I want you, as soon as you notice you're having a self loathing thought, interrupt it and say, no, that left with the kidney. And then immediately imagine there's a little boy's hand in yours. He's five years old, feel the warmth of his hand. And you're walking up some steps to an elementary school and there's a kindergarten teacher waiting. And your son's going into kindergarten and he's happy and you're happy and you're there. Hear the click of your heels around the corner and there's your first classroom and you're a teacher. Then fast forward in your mind and you're sitting in a big stadium or auditorium and on the floor all these caps and gowns and you hear your son's name called and he's walking across the stage holding up his high school diploma and you're cheering and you think of all the moments you've been there to help him have this result and your teaching career is growing. Then fast forward, and you're sitting in the front row of a wedding. At your son's wedding, he's marrying the love of his life, and you're the mother of the groom and how grateful you are to be there and celebrate with him, and your teaching career is flourishing. And she said, just repeat that. And she left. And surgery happened. They told my parents and my son's father, Haven married to him for a long time, that one kidney was totally destroyed. The other kidney was pockmarked and shriveled, and they didn't know if I'd even get six months. But over the next couple of weeks, my numbers, instead of plummeting like they'd been doing, just started to stabilize. And finally they said, well, maybe you're going to get a little more time than we thought. So if you want to go home for. I don't know if you get a week or two or three, but before you have to come back to the hospital, you have more time with your son. So I went home in an ambulance. I couldn't even get my head off the pillow and had to go three times a week to have numbers read. But my numbers started to improve and improve after. It was about six months after the surgery. I was sitting in a hospital conference room with the surgeon that all the people who had helped me, and they're scratching their heads. And the surgeon said, I saw that left kidney. It was pockmarked. It was shriveled for some reason, and we don't have science for this, but that kidney is currently functioning as a whole perfect kidney. We don't know how long this will last or if it'll last, but what. And then he said, whatever you've been doing, keep doing it. I didn't know what I'd been doing. I was, you know, today we would call me in unconscious, competent. You know, I did what she told me to do in terms of holding my mind in certain ways, visualizing my future, visualizing what I would love and seeing myself in the picture, which is part of the clue. It can't be something out there. It has to be something that's in the eternal here and now. And I'm living that life for the emotion to kick in and for you to have the real. Such an imaginary experience that it seems real. So that was the beginning, and then just. It was, you know, I got well, and I was really happy about that, but I was too young and immature to get curious yet. But if maybe three years later I was starting to get my. I had entered university and now I'm starting to get my undergraduate degree. And I went to a lecture and this man said, nothing is bad unless you think it's bad. And I'm young, I'm in my 20s, and I'm going, whoa, that's not true. There's bad stuff in this world. And he says, I agree with you. There's things in this world we all want to change, but in a universe there is. In this universe, he said, there can't be a bad without there being something in it that's really good. So this is of course, typical Napoleon Hill. But he said, so here's an experiment. The next time something happens in your life that immediately you think this is bad, hit your internal pause button and wait three days and, and wait. And during that three days, you're not sitting idly by, you're actually thinking, what possible good? What possible good could there be in this? And then if after three days you can't find any good, go ahead and get upset. You haven't surrendered your right to get upset about it, but do that experiment. So we left two days later. Now I have two sons by now their dad came and I came home from work and I said, what happened? He said, there was a massive layoff. 100 of us lost our jobs. I lost my job today and it was my first knee jerk. Lose a job, that's bad, feel bad, panic. I was on that train that I had typically run down reacting to what happened. And wait a minute, that guy Sunday said, nothing's bad unless we think it's bad. This just seems so bad. Hit your internal pause button. I didn't even know I had one. Where is that? And wait three days. Tuesday at 5, Friday at 5, then panic. We're supposed to look for good. And so he was better at it than I was. He said, Well, I drive 90 minutes each way to work. What if I found something closer to home? My comment was, well, how are you going to do that? He said, well, I don't know. But if I, if it, if I did find something closer to home, that would be good. What if I made more money? How are you going to make more money? So my. I was going right to the how versus just landing on the what at that point. So he was better at it than I was. And the next day he find out some places that were. But because he was thinking of the possible good, what if it was closer to home? What if he made more money? What if even possibly he worked shorter hours? Because he worked very long hours before that. And this caused him to think about some possible places. Two of those places were taking applications. The next day he got an. He got an interview. And Thursday afternoon he had a new job so close to home he could ride his bike to work, which he loved. Shorter hours, slightly more pay. And I remember Jack Thursday evening thinking, this is the first time in my life where I had something occur that seemed really bad at first and I didn't have to wait for it to all get resolved before I could feel better. That the feeling I had about myself in life wasn't depend so dependent on the conditions that I was in. And it was the beginning of getting very interested. Like how do you have a condition in your life without the condition having you with reactive based thinking and feeling. And so that began the study of well over 50 years.

A quick question for you. I mean, did you ever see that nurse again after that night?

Yes, she was a chaplain. I did, but not so I got interested. I got graduated, went to a seminary for two years, began my graduate work and then I opened my first work after traveling the country for 15 months, speaking in various places. That was in 1981. In 1983, on a Sunday morning she walked in, came up to me and she says, do you remember me? And I didn't remember her. And I said, well, you look a little familiar. And she says, I'm the woman who walked in your room that night. And by now my son is God. She was born in 6, so he's 14. So it was many years later that she came, she heard the work I was doing and traced it back. And I had the same name. And so she knew who it was. And you know, she had studied what we call mind science in all kinds of backgrounds. So yep, that was really wonderful.

Well, God was looking out for you. Had she not walked in that room, we might be having this conversation. It's amazing when you think about it. Yeah, likely, yeah, you talked about conditions and you talk about that in your book. And a lot of what you're teaching is about not letting your conditions. When you talk about common hour thinking versus brave thinking. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

You and I have both deep appreciation for Emerson, Thoreau, that part of the work of beginning to understand some things about how powerful our thoughts are. In fact, it's often said that there were two revolutions in the United States. The first a revolution for independence. The second a different kind of independent revolution which was independence of thinking. And Emerson and Thoreau so Thoreau is the one who coined the phrase common hour thinking and common our thinking. We are all. You can't get raised in a western society without being trained in common hour thinking or condition based thinking. You want to start a business, well, where's the money going to come from? And where's how am I going to have marketing? And just like I was, it's going to the how and looking to conditions to give yourself permission for whether you can be and do and have what you want to be and do and have. And that's common our thinking. When I coined the phrase brave thinking because it takes real courage to think and live from a vision regardless of the circumstances, situations and conditions. And so that's why I wanted to put this in a book and make it very simple. Because after studying and working in what I call the laboratory called life, with literally as you said, thousands of people helping them take a vision and then turn that into results. What's in the middle? You know, it's both an art and a science to dream build. Everybody has dreams and very few people know how to dream build, which is the science part of it.

Well, unpack that a little more. So you talk about these three steps and building is a piece of it. There pretend people haven't heard about this before. What would you tell them? Building stage.

Stage one is to know what you would really want. Not what you think you can have, not what your conditions give you permission to have. But what? And so the question I encourage people is don't ask what would I want? I don't think it's a high enough calibrated question. Ask what would I love? What would I love in my health, in my relationships, in what I'm doing with my time and talent. Whether you are an income doing it or not, we all do something with our time and talent. Is it fulfilling? Is it difference making? Does it bring you life? And then we all have a quadrant called time and money freedom. And some of us have a lot of that and some of us have not so much. So what would you love in that quadrant? Because it's measurable. Your calendar shows you how much freedom you have and so does your accounts. So this is developing a well constructed dream that answers the question what would I love? And one way to start is to start with what you know for sure. Start with what you know for sure you want three years from now in your life or two years from now in your life and begin to build. So I wanted to raise my little boy and become a teacher. So there's stages of that. There was walking him to kindergarten, being at the graduation, being at his wedding, and my teaching career flourishing along the way. So getting a clear picture of what I would love is step one, and I call it blueprinting, because you want it in detail, so you want to have where you can actually step into the picture. You know, I studied Thoreau and Emerson for many, many years. But it was in fact, it was after my first book, Building youg Field of Dreams, which was at that point the best version of this proven, repeatable system that I knew how to articulate. But then it would be in 2007 when I went there with my now almost 20 year husband, Joe, and I was reading Thoreau again. And that very famous quote. If one advances confidently in the direction of their dre, endeavoring to live the life they've imagined, you pass an invisible boundary and the rest of that. And I looked at Joe and I said, oh my gosh, this is not just a great quote, this is a code. So if one advances confidently in the direction of their dream, well, you can't advance confidently in a direction you don't already have a picture of in your mind because you don't know which way to turn. So if one advances confidently. So I looked at that confidence and I realized I'm not going to be confident in me because I haven't done that before. It's something beyond what I've done before this dream. But so we get confident in the invisible laws that govern results. So in dream building, the art is in the vision, but the science is in the vibration which he's speaking to when he says, if one advances confidently in the direction of their dream, endeavoring not to get to the dream, endeavoring to live the life they've imagined today. Which means while I'm in an intensive care ward, my mind I'm imagining walking my boy into kindergarten. So I'm doing the thing I can to put myself in being the person who's having the life I'm imagining. He said, do that and you pass an invisible boundary. Because the boundary wasn't out there, the boundary was in me. And we begin to surmount that both in our vibration and vibration dictates everything we're going to do. You know, our friend Bob Proctor used to call it paradigm. It is a paradigm, but it controls everything. So I can't be on CNN and watch Discovery. They're not on the same frequency. I got to change the frequency. So once you know what you would really love in the major areas of your life and see yourself having and begin to feel what that feels like for you. That is step one. Step two is the practice of staying on that frequency and we call that bridging because it's very tempting to look at what I do have currently. Want something completely different, love of my life if I haven't had that, or dynamic health with a long term situation been going on or, or, or and believe that there's power in those conditions that's greater than the power that's actually breathing us. Not one of us created ourselves. We can't make ourselves one heartbeat happen under our own power. We're not even breathing. We're on our own power. We're being breathed. And this wonderful spirit life, sacred energy called life is happening into and through us. And it is, it is ever seeking greater versions of itself by means of itself. So it's sending us, every one of us, signals for more life. And the way we can identify those to help us know what our dream is is to notice your longing and notice your discontent. Certain leading thoughts of longing like oh, I just wish I could, what's behind that? What? Fill in the blank or I'm so tired of fill in the blank. That's life being thwarted. It's seeking to express more and it's hemmed in. So once you identify your longing and your discontent, then you generate or devise, dream up a vision, a blueprint that answers your longing and dissolves your discontent. And that's your vision. Now we have to match the vibration of that and that's in the bridging section, which is simple tools for imagining yourself being that person, feeling that. And you don't have to do it all the time. The good news is you don't have to be perfect at it, but you just want more on that frequency than on the frequency is this thing ever going to happen? And maybe I don't deserve it and maybe it's not in the cards for me. And we've all been trained in a lot of superstitious thinking, you know, there's no cards. It's the reason I don't have it is I'm not a match for it, that's all. And I can become a match for it. And then the other.

Yeah, talk a little more about raising and maintaining your frequency. I think it's a word you and I pass. We say it quickly and we know what it means. I think for a lot of people, they're not quite sure. And I know there's techniques and positive thinkings. One of Them, meditation, things like that. What do you share as tools? I know you talk about your book as a toolbox as well as everything else that's in it.

So once you have crafted your vision that sets the vibration, now most of us will go on off, on off, on off, on the vision. Like we want that, but our general tone of frequency is not a match for that. And we know it is because otherwise we'd have it. So one practice, a simple one, is you're standing at the. You know, we all do what I call mundane things every day. You know, washing dishes, driving the kids to school and back, or, or, or the person who's living the life you have think certain thoughts while you're doing those things, like, oh, I wish it were, and you're in your longing and discontent. The person who has the life you're imagining is thinking different thoughts and they're feeling different feelings. So this then becomes the art part of matching that vibration is the person who has the life I'm imagining while they're doing dishes, what are they thinking? They're not, oh, is this going to, how long is this going to take? They're thinking, I love my life. I'm grateful today. Look at how beautiful the do on the. This is. There's just a heightened level of gratitude. And one of the things we know about gratitude is gratitude is the frequency that matches abundance, that it's harmonious with abundance. So when we, when everything is abundant, I mean, we're naturally grateful. But most of that is what I call knee jerk gratitude, where I'm grateful because something happened. You actually can. We all can generate gratitude, learn to just generate gratitude. But it's not, we're not looking for a reason. If there has to be a reason. It's like, I got to wake up today. Not everybody did. And then, so you're more generally grateful. You're going to find you start attracting more things that are a match to what it is you want just naturally because of the way you're running your own energy. So that, that is key and it's a doorway.

I like that. I like that. I think I do that. I mean, I'm washing the dishes. And when I was younger, that was like a punishment. You're going to wash the dishes today. My brother and I, we'd do things to each other. Like I'd wash them all, but not rinse them. And then I'd rinse them all at once and put them in the thing and he had to dry them. You know, just little things to Try to survive it. And now today, when I'm doing it, I'm enjoying the heat of the water on my hands, you know, and the texture of things. And somewhere, once I read something, it changed everything for me. So I'm not cleaning the kitchen, I'm sparkling it up, you know, and I love the sparkle, you know, so I'm enjoying sparkling it up. It changed the whole thing for me. And that's really kind of cool. And I learned recently too about gratitude that so many times I would just when I was first learning it, I'd write down, oh, I'm grateful for my dog, grateful for my wife, grateful for my house, and move on. It was like there was no emotion, no feeling for it. And it was the same three things often, you know, and someone said, find three things every day that are totally new. And so now you start looking for new things to be grateful for. And they're there. They've always been there, you know, I mean, you go to a third world.

Country and you realize a lot of awareness.

Yeah.

You know, so you're bringing more and more into your awareness.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's way cool. Talked about. Every thought is either expansive or empowering or constrictive and disempowering. And you mentioned that that humans were the only animals or something like that that actually resist expansion, that everyone else. The grass grows naturally. The dogs want to eat the food and get bigger and have fun.

We're in a spiral universe. We're in a spiral universe. So there's an ever evenly present everywhere, an upward pull to becoming in a spiral. And so life, it's pulling a blade of grass to be its best blade of grassness. Today, more than yesterday, you'll even press through cement, seeking the light. And the same thing with a tree, but in. And it doesn't have any different other than humans, as far as I can tell. And I'm open to learning new things, but as far as I can tell, with 50 years of research behind me, humans are the only ones who can thwart life. It's not convenient. I'll do it after the kids graduate. I don't have the money, so I'm not going to take a risk today. That life sending signals for growth, for more is that we can squash that. But life is like. It's an energy. It's like a river running into and through us, seeking expression. And either we give it a constructive expression or we thwart it, but it doesn't stop flowing. So what's going to happen? It's Going to form what I call mutated forms of life, unlived life. Those show up as problems, difficulties, diseases, struggle, all kinds of things that are unexpressed. Life that answer, that pull forward so it's not convenient, or I don't have the money, or what do people think or all of the things that we as humans get trained in.

Yeah, I like to talk about that. The universe is constantly expressing itself through us. And the word express ex is like exit. Wants to come out, wants to be expressed. Depression is pushing down against that expression. And then it leads to mental illness. It leads to like an acupuncture. What the they going, what are they doing? They're loosening up places where the energy stuck. And we do that with therapy, we do with imagination, we do with meditation and so forth. I'm remembering an experience I had. I was in Texas and this guy is a chiropractor, but he's also like a genius guru type guy. And he asked me after a session I did with him, he said, what do you think the purpose of the universe is? I'd never been asked that question. I knew what my purpose was and life purpose and universe. So I took about a minute or two to think about it. I didn't want to be wrong, I want to be right. And then I realized the universe is constantly expanding since the Big Bang. It's just going like this, you know. And I said, well, I think the purpose of the universe is to expand. He said, that's right. And that's your purpose. Everything is to expand. Expansion of consciousness. And yet like you said, we can block it. You know, one of the things I've been using as a technique, I don't know where I learned it, but someone taught it to me. You take 3 by 5, those little yellow post, its maybe 2 by 3 inches, whatever they are, and you put them around your house, on a wall, on a mirror, refrigerator, they're just blank. But every time you see one, you have to ask yourself, what am I thinking? And then if it's not an uplifting experience of thought, you immediately replace it. And I still have them around my house. And I notice now almost every time I look at them, I'm thinking something positive. And that wouldn't have been true two or three years ago. So that it's a. It's an awareness technique.

Yeah, I hadn't thought of the years ago Gay. I was thinking about Gay Hendrix, talking about expand. I was going to say something about him and expansion and contraction, which I will in a minute. But I Remember thinking, okay, so here's, this is years ago. Like here's, here's the deal. Stay awake more often, fall asleep less often, contract falling asleep, or be thinking that something's happening to me instead of with and through me. So I just thought, how do I do that? How do I stay more awake to my own thinking? And the idea came about. Handles like drawer. Every time I touch a handle, drawer handles, car handles, toilet handles, sink handles, chest drawer handles to just every time I touch a handle, pump to ask myself, how am I handling my thinking? So same. We all touch a bunch of them every day. It took a while to install that of repetition, but it has changed my life. So I can see why. One time I was wanting to do an exercise in the science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. The idea of reading chapters 4, 7, 11 and 14, which are the kind of the key constructs of that awareness about how to put yourself on a higher vibration for allowing more whatever it is you want in your life. And the instruction was to read it every single day for 90 days and if you miss a day, start over. And the first time I did it, I got to day 57, and day went by. And the next morning I got up and I went. I never thought, I didn't. I had full intention. I'd been doing it for 57 days. But I must have been like, right at a breakthrough. And my whatever just distracted me that day. The paradigm or the pattern that I had was not going to be broken through. And it just, it, I. I didn't even. It wasn't like I thought about it and I'll do it later. I never thought about it. So I thought, well, that's powerful. So that's when I use the sticky notes. So I put sticky notes on my, my lamp where I turn off my light at night. I'm not going to turn that lamp off without knowing, did you do it today? And then I got my 90 days in. But I think those prompts are very, very helpful for us.

You know, I was thinking about your handling every time you touch a handle. And I love the pun that goes with it. But there was. I was reading a book, I forget the name of it and the author, but he's the peak performance expert at the United States Military Academy at West Point. And what he does. If you read the book, you'd think you and I wrote it. And he's really aligned with all this. But one of the things he teaches people, every time they go through a door, they had touch the top of the door and say their affirmation. And think about it, you're going to the bathroom, you're coming out of the bathroom, you're going into the bedroom, you're coming out of the bedroom, you're going into the car. So again, it's that repetition of intention that keeps us awake. Otherwise we just go fall back into those old habits.

It was Gay Hendricks who suggested to me over a decade ago. He said, just start noticing when you're feeling. He said, the first creation isn't in the forms. The first creation is in our feelings because our thoughts generate a vibration and we pick that up in our nervous system and it registers as a feeling. But if we're not aware of that, it goes, it moves and gathers more energy unless we shift it, particularly when we're in constrictive vibration. That's going to. We don't want to add a lot of dimension to that. So he said, just start noticing when you feel expansive and when you start to feel a little more just kind of contractive. He's just get to know that Mary. So this is, oh, Maybe it's even 20 years ago, probably more accurately. And he said, and then you can ask yourself, so what was I thinking? What was I watching or reading or who was I talking to? That's part of. And he said, you start navigating and moving yourself into activities, conversations, what you're reading or listening to or watching that it doesn't have to be, you know, necessarily deep study into metaphysics. It's just. But notice where you're feeling more expensive, expansive. And when you start to feel contractive and navigate with that, and that's really, you know, brave thinking is very much that. It's.

Notice that like I teach in my seminars, when you're. That expansion is a feedback mechanism, says you're on course, you're doing the thing you're supposed to do. Like your life purpose is getting handled at some level. You're supposed to be expressing, experiencing what you're experiencing. That's why you feel expansive. And if you're feeling contracted, it's like you're off course. You know, the thing you're doing isn't going to get you where you want to go or it isn't going to get you what you want to be experiencing in the moment. And I think you probably remember Zenda Brooke, who you and I know through the Transformational Leadership Council. That's her whole teaching. It's just you feeling this expansion in your chest and your body, or are you experiencing contraction and for me, that's been such a quick little method, if you will, for tuning in Power Tool.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want you to share your story about your mother. And she started painting. That story. I love that story. And I think it's so illustrative of what so many people think. One of those constrictive thoughts is, I'm too old.

My mother and dad were married for 63 years. They were best friends their whole life. And then my dad died. My mother was. Had just turned 85. She was just devastated at first and depressed. And finally, after many years, maybe six or eight months after he passed, she called me one day and she said, so if God is still breathing me, I guess there's something I should do with my life. Let me try that Dream Builder thing you do. She'd been around my work, but she'd never been in my work. And I want to try that Dream Builder thing. I said, okay. I said, so we'll meet once a week for 12 weeks, and then you can decide whether you like this and we can keep going or not. And the first question was, so is there anything you've ever thought about doing that. Because she was pretty down at this point. And I said, so is there anything you've ever thought about doing in life that either the timing wasn't right, the money wasn't there, or you just didn't. Wasn't the right time to act on it. And immediately she says, well, I'm not artistic and I don't have any talent is how it started. But I've thought about painting on china. I mean, I've seen people who do art on China. And I mean, I just thought someday, but, you know, I'm 85, that. That. That train has long left the station. That's what she said. I said, well, what if it hasn't? I mean, if you were going to give yourself permission to just even explore it, what step would you take? And she paused and said, well, I guess I'd look to see if there's any classes. And that's how it started. And so she started taking some classes. Turned out she had natural talent. She was quite good at nature pictures. And so time went on and she kept getting better. And her teacher said, well, we're going to put some of your things in a gallery. And so between and then, she was now 89, and she says, so what do I have? This is growing. And she's in several galleries and she's selling pieces and her family. That's all we all got Christmas presents of her, you know, art with her name on it. And from cups to plaques to one of the time Jack I have on my wall here in my office when everything fell apart for me and I was in a dark night of the soul. She painted me a plaque about this big and it's a branch and there's 1, 1, 2, 3, 6 birds perched upward and one hanging upside down but hanging on like this. And it says hang on, hang in there Mary. That's what she, she put as a gift to me that year. And then she had gone to hear Mohandas Yunus, the founder of the Grameen bank, the microlending bank. She had a lecture by him and she got this idea of starting a non profit to do microlending to Northwest vets or their spouse if the vet had either been disabled and wasn't able to start something on their own and the spouse needed to earn income. So microlending to help them navigate when a spouse was killed in the Iraq or the Afghan war or injured and to help them do that. And so she started. She wrote a book from the time I was a little girl. She always had. She was raised in the depression, that money was tight, very tight. But her grandmother had taught her and her mother had died young. You can always have a zip in your day. You can put your peanut butter sandwich on a piece of china or you can do this or go home a different way or no day is complete. If you haven't put a zip in the day, you don't wait life to give you a zip. You put your own zip in the day. So I was raised that way. So mom wrote a book called 90 Ways to Put a Zip in youn Day and that she sold that and then that helped raise money for this nonprofit. So her most. She died at 92, was on a stage with me the week before and then had a heart attack. And by the next Friday she was gone. She had. Her most creative years were between 85 and 92. She. She started that art career. She has. We all have the gifts of those in our homes, things sold in galleries. She had that in her life and she started a non profit that continues today. All between 85 and 92. That's just a great.

No, it's such, you know, it's so illustrative of what's possible for us. I want to tease out a little principle from there. You. I don't know the exact words you said you could say it again, but you said something like well, if you were going to take A step. What would be the first step to taking that direction? If it were possible, what's the first thing you would do? And she said, well, I see if there was a class, and I think that's such a great intervention for anybody who's going, well, that's not possible. Well, if it were possible, what would be the first step you could take in that direction? And then you write in a book about baby steps taking tiny baby. And we see all these books now about tiny habits and things like that. You talk about habits and small steps.

I'm a firm believer that baby steps will take you all the way up Mount Everest if you just keep taking them. But when, if you're looking at the top of Mount Everest and you think you can take a baby step, you can lose motivation versus celebrating the step you can take. And those I coach or help, I always say, just take one a day. And pretty soon that begins to build a momentum. But you don't have to do more than that in the beginning. But you want one a day, just one a day. It can be a five minute. We call it the five minute power move, where you listen to what could I do in five minutes that would move me in the direction of my dream? And then you come up with a number of them and you pick one and you act on it. But the acting on it actually completes a circuit. So the vision, the vibration, and then the action you take from the vibration of being the person doing the thing, pretty soon you've got a whole pattern of you being that and doing that and having that.

Yeah. I always tell people, if you write one page a day, at the end of the year, you have a 365 page book.

Book.

And everybody can write one page. Or as one of my friends who was a Christian who had never read the Bible, someone challenged him, said, how can you be a Christian and not read a Bible? He said, well, it's just so big. He said, well, could you read one page a day? So he started reading one page a day. And he noticed sometimes when he sit down after reading one page, he kept turning the pages. You know, those little one minute turns into five minutes turned into ten minutes, and pretty soon he'd finished the Bible. So. So yeah, one whack at a tree with an ax, you do that for a long time, the tree's gonna come down. I don't care how big it is. Absolutely reminds me of a story we put in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book about a woman named Helen Klein who was 83 I met her when she was 83 and she was getting an award for being this amazing triathlete and marathon runner. And the story goes, when she was 55 years old, she was challenged by her husband to do a 10k race. And she said, okay, I'll do that with you. And they ran around the backyard. One time she fell on the ground wheezing. She was a smoker. She hadn't exercised in years. She said it's disgusting. She stopped smoking. She added one wrap every night around the backyard. Eventually she ran blocks, adding a block every day, telephone pole every day before she turned around. And when I met her at 83, she had run 60 marathons, 140 ultramarathons. She was oldest woman to complete the Ironman Triathlon at 59. She ran five 100 mile mountain races when she was 66. And I could go on with her records. She was the 80 to 85 year old age group record holder at 26.2 miles in 4 hours and 32 minutes. And so again, never too late to start.

Oh my gosh. I'm so inspired by that. Wow.

And it was one lap around the backyard, additional every day. That's all it really. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and longer and longer.

That's the power of baby steps, isn't it?

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Wow. You know, I want to just remind people about the internal pause button. I, I, I had forgotten that I once kind of knew that Lisa Nichols once taught that to some kids. You know, push the button, stop the tape, you know, and so thank you for that. That's a really valuable technique that we have, that ability to pause.

I'd be interested in your. Along the way, one of the things that I think has been a key for that, and I'd be interested in your take on this, Jack, is the practice of noticing what we're noticing, not judging it, but just noticing. So you can't notice if you're an expansion or contraction unless you're noticing.

Right.

So to notice what you're noticing, and that's where nothing's bad unless you think it's bad, hit your internal pause button. Where is that? That's where that, it's a kind of cognizance that is metacognition.

Metacognition, yeah, metacognition, yes.

So you can notice what you're noticing and without reacting or responding to it, but you can notice it. That doorway.

For me, I think two things influenced that in my life. One was a gestalt therapist. I worked with Many years ago, who taught me the formula E plus R equals O. There's an event. You then have a response or a reaction. A reaction is unconscious, a response is conscious, and that produces the outcome that you get. And if you don't like your outcomes, what most people do is they blame the events. You know, the Senate, the economy, conditions, as you called it. And where our power is, is in our response. So all things are meaningless until you ascribe meaning to them. You know, all things are just neutral. And so we get to choose. And a lot of people think their feelings are a response and their feelings are actually the result of a thought. The thought produces the feeling. You know, fear is produced by imagining bad things happening in the future. Otherwise, if you imagine good things happening in the future, there's no fear. So we're using this exhibitor called negative goal setting. We're using the power of our mind to visualize what we don't want, which is insane, but we do it. And then I think what really cemented it for me was Byron, Katie's work of, you know, is it really true? Can I know? It's true. Who am I when I think that negative thought? I'm mad at my wife. I'm distant, I'm judgmental, punishing. Who am I without that thought? I'm peaceful, I'm happy, I'm joyful. And sometimes you have to own that you're doing that thought, you know, the thing you're blaming someone else for, but that. I remember coming home in a car with a cassette tape in the car, leaning forward, listening to it because it was really badly recorded. And I was really.

That was a day or two ago.

Yeah, I was really angry at Mark Victor Hanson, my co author for Chicken Soup for Some Damn Thing. I don't remember what it was. And then I'm going like, well, he shouldn't have done that. Well, do I really know that's true? Well, no, I don't. Who am I without that thought? Blah, blah. And she said she calls it to work. And you do it every single day, like you talked about for 30 days, 90 days. At the end of that, it just gets neutral. It's just something's happening, you know. And then with meditation, you know, I teach that you're standing by a river and boats are going by, and they're just thoughts. The challenge is most people get off the river into the boat. Now you're in the boat and you're going down the river, you're thinking again, you know, you're in it you're not observing it. And then recently, one of my friends, Stephen Josephs, who's an ex NLP practitioner, taught me something very powerful. He said, notice who's noticing now stand back and notice the one who's noticing that he's noticing. And he did that about five ways back. Like in each time I was noticing the noticer and noticing the one who's noticing them, I got stoned in my mind. I was like. It was like being on a rug. It was like so freeing. It was incredible. So I totally agree. That's. That's the ultimate place is just awareness, your pure awareness. And you know, people, people do drugs, they meditate for days in caves. And it's all about to get to that state where you. There's no I and thou. There's just awareness. Pure bliss, if you will. For me, I've only experienced that a couple times in my life. But man, when you're just there and nothing's being judged or categorized, made into form.

One with the one.

Yeah. You're one with the one. Yeah. There you go.

Can I tell one quick little story about after my mother died? So she passed away two years later. I was speaking in Seattle at an event and you know, for speakers, people line up to talk to you afterwards. And this couple much, you know, they seem way older than me at the time, so I don't know if they were in their seventies now I'm in. But anyway, so they said, well, you know, they thanked me and then they said, so we have your mother's book to thank. We have your mother's book to thank for a brand new dining table we have. And I said, how did my mother's book help you get a new dining table? And they said, well, we decided we would do every single one of her zips in the day for 90 days. We would do one a day. And when we did the one do it on the dining table, that's when we needed a new dining table.

That's great.

So anyway, I think it's fun to have.

Yeah, well, we're drawing to it closer. I have two questions for you real quick. One I love you said brave thinking. You're going to think anyway, so why not choose brave thinking? I love that quote. That's a great quote. So if people want to get your book, you have a website for that. You want to share that?

We do. Bti.com bravethinkinginstitute.com that's the website. And I think we have. Make sure I know we have a gift Gift. That's. It's a downloadable.

A gift from Mary. Pay attention.

A gift from there. It'll be right there. But the website is bti bravethinkinginstitute.com and the book is available at all the places we get books. You're starting something, you've got a coaching thing you're developing now and I wanted to support that.

Well, we started the new program for what we call highly motivated people. People that are wanting to step up to the highest level that when we call it the Legacy club. And the purpose of it is to help people get in touch with this concept of legacy is not as something you're going to leave behind when you die in the distant future, but it's something that we're creating every day through our choices. And I'm curious how you would define your personal legacy and has it always been the same or has it evolved over time as you've walked along your path?

Well, I love that more recently I've been working with the legacy of wanting this 50 years of my work to be codified in such ways that it lives well beyond me. And I'm building that and feeling, you know, that's been a real pull for me. In fact, the neighborhood Joe and I moved in, we bought a new house six years ago. I was here three years before. I just happened to glance at the name of this. We live on one sided street on a golf course. And the name of this, not the street we live on, but the neighborhood of this 15 houses is legacy. I thought that was an unconscious, but it's legacy. So yeah, I agree with you. I think your real legacy is the wake in your path of how you've lived. That's the real legacy. Whether there's legacy in the work world or in trainings or all those other things are wonderful. But those moments that with our children, our spouse, how we contribute in the community we're in, the difference we make with our friends and the people we help along the way. And for you and I, we have had the privilege of helping lots and lots of people by means of the work we do and how grateful we are, you know, it's, you know, we've helped pioneer an industry today. Yeah, yeah. And that's a real beautiful blessing of legacy.

Well, you know, the books you write, the courses you teach, the coaches you've trained, the trainers you've trained, the corporate people who you've managed to help them change how they do things so that all the people in their organization, their vibration goes up. They're making more of a difference, they're happier. I've been training trainers now and Chicken soup books. I think we're up to 300 of them, you know, all around the world. And you know, it's funny, I never thought about it much. It's what I loved to do. And I know you have that same thing that the thing you love most is working with people and watching their eyes light up and then get it. And that's the same for me. We both started out as teachers, me in high school in Chicago. And so yeah, that's, that's, that's what I do.

So the Legacy Club. Tell me. So the Legacy Club is a vision that get. So it's high performers.

Yeah. So it's a, it's a one year commitment and that we meet every month, several times by Zoom and then twice a year they come together for a two and a half day retreat. And then we also, we give them free tickets to our breakthrough to success training. If they want to do that, they can bring a guest. So there's a lot of. And then we, we have experts come in, people like yourself, you know, that they might not have access to interact with and you know, everything from, you know, cleaning up your environments to your health to your relationships to investing money, all the different areas you talk about, you know, the four areas you focus on. And really what I was envisioning and we'll do is that we'll have people looking at, we talk about seven areas of your life, you know, contribution being one of them, fun and recreation, things like that. And what happens is I want them to grow in every one of those areas over the course of the year with a focus on one or two that they come wanting, you know, to write their book, you know, start their TV program, start their podcast, build a school in Africa, whatever it might be, but also to have all of their life. Because we see a lot of people whose lives are out of balance, you know, they work too hard or they play too much, you know, or vice versa. And so the, that, that's the, the idea of it. And you know, it's the first time we've chosen to do something that long and also that expensive because we really want people to make a commitment to play at the highest level. I know when I've signed up for high intention courses that cost a little more than normal, I do the work because I've invested in it, you know, so.

That's right.

Yeah. And part of it too is to hang out with other people that are playing at that level, you know, it's one thing to have a CEO in a group and then have someone who's just starting college. They're at different levels in their career. They can both learn from each other and help each other. But we really wanted to start with people that are already performing at a certain level. Take them up to Olympic. That's right, Olympic level.

So if somebody hears this right now and they're interested, what, what step, what's the first step they could take?

Well, they can go to jackhamfield.com and there'll be a, there'll be a button that says legacy club. We also have other coaching programs that are less expensive. And I would say if you really want to have the best experience and to go deep with us, one would be to take our breakthrough to success training. It's a three day training. And also our train the trainer program where we teach, and you and I are similar, we teach experiential learning that people learn by experiencing. And I would say that I've dedicated my life to probably, I probably know 500 exercises that people can do that they transform by doing them, not by me talking at them. And that's a transformation that velcros to the system and you can't resist it. You're different after you go through it. It's like going through a car wash. You're not the same.

That's right. I just want to say to the person who's listening to this, if there's any part of you that feels resonant with being the high performer that I've known Jack Canfield for decades, that if you invested in that one year, it could be one of the most instrumental years of your life. And then of course, anybody who's listening would definitely get value from all the other things that are there. But I think the person who's hearing this knows who they are right now. And go to jackcanfield.com and click that legacy and check it out.

Well, thank you. We have a mutual admiration to society. I would say the same thing about anyone that wanted to work with you. So thank you, Mary. I appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun.

It sure has. I'm looking forward to seeing you next month or in January.

January at our transformational Leadership Council meeting in New Orleans. Should be fun. All right, and thanks to all of you for joining us today on the Jack Canfield podcast. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate it and leave a review. And as always, keep applying what you're learning to creating the life of your dream.